Announcement of issue No. 2 of the journal “Sociology: Theory, Methods, Marketing” (2025)

The following articles and materials will be published in issue No. 2 of the journal:

Olga Kutsenko

Framing War: The Evolution of the Social Perception of war in Ukraine

The study analyses the evolution of the perception of war in Ukrainian society between the beginning of 2022 and 2025, tracing its transformation through five key psychological and socio-political phases. The initial shock and mass mobilisation gradually gave way to adaptive euphoria, followed by a realisation of the war's protracted character and fatigue with it, and later by the routinisation of emergency conditions and long-term resistance. The study is based on empirical data from Ukraine's leading survey centres and traces changes in public moods, strategic expectations and the processes of forming national identity.

A comparative analysis of historical cases of defensive and protracted military conflicts, in particular the First and Second World Wars and the war in Vietnam, reveals both general regularities in the perception of war — the effect of national consolidation, war fatigue, social resilience — and the specific features of a contemporary 21st-century conflict shaped by globalised information flows, international assistance and the digital space of war.

Kateryna Maltseva

Social determinants of health in biocultural research: a review of evidence

Human health is a biocultural phenomenon. Among the challenges facing today's social scientists, the need to understand, measure and explain the influence of culture on human physiological states stands out. Contemporary biocultural research addresses a variety of themes and applies many different intellectual approaches. This is a relatively new research path. Social-epidemiological studies provide further ground for understanding the risk factors associated with these determinants and the channels through which the influence of social circumstances on health outcomes is mediated.

Nicolas Hayoz, Viktor Stepanenko

The social organisation of war: Ukrainian and Russian societies mobilised for war

The authors analyse how Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine has changed Ukrainian and Russian societies. They examine the social organisation of war and how Ukraine and Russia are adapting and changing in wartime conditions. Combining political-science and sociological approaches, the authors interpret the war in its organisational and communicative aspects in the context of opposing political regimes: dictatorial autocracy in Russia and democracy in Ukraine.

Societies at war should be distinguished from an organised and highly militarised society of war such as Russia, which has imposed on its neighbour military, organisational and ideological constraints to which Ukraine must respond with its own militarisation and organisation of war and warfare. The social organisation of war is understood as a complex multi-level interaction of various institutional actors and spheres (the state, the army, non-governmental organisations, business, the media, the public and private spheres and so on). At the same time, military mobilisation in the two societies has different organisational and communicative effects and different, often opposite, political, cultural and social consequences.

Liudmyla Kalashnikova, Olena Liseienko, Yana Barinova

Ukrainian migration to Austria: challenges and features of social adaptation

The article attempts to outline the specifics of Ukrainian migration to Austria on the basis of a summary of official data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on the number of Ukrainian citizens registered with the consulate in Austria, and of data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. A summary of the results of an empirical sociological study conducted by Ipsos.SA at the request of the Office of the High Commissioner, using an online questionnaire in January–March 2023 among 1,500 citizens of Ukraine representing 553 households that migrated to Austria under duress since the beginning of the war, made it possible to outline the current trends in Ukrainians' social adaptation to Austrian society. The subjective indicator of migrants' adaptability was their level of satisfaction with the organisation of their lives and with the level of support provided by the receiving country.

Oleksandr Rakhmanov

The digitalisation of economic life and social stratification in Ukraine: features of the relationship

The article analyses the mutual influence of the digitalisation of economic life and social stratification in Ukraine. It establishes the potential of theories of social stratification for explaining digital inequalities. Using the data of the Institute of Sociology's 2024 monitoring survey, it analyses the indicator of the use of digital tools in the workplace against material situation, employment status, self-assessed status position and objective class belonging. Obtained by drawing on the explanatory possibilities of classical theories of social stratification, the results of the analysis point to several tendencies. The fact that skilled workers use digital devices and technologies more actively than those in routine non-manual work is fairly close to functionalist explanations of digital inequality, in which differing demands on the labour market regulate and select the people needed with the appropriate skills. Despite the dependence of digitalisation on material situation and subjective social status, somewhat less use of digital tools was recorded among the wealthiest respondents than among the well-off, and among those who placed themselves on the highest rungs than among those who placed themselves in the middle. This phenomenon is explained in Weberian terms: the prestige of occupying the highest rungs of the social hierarchy lies not so much in possessing digital qualifications as in exercising power.

Liubov Bevzenko

A sociology of the expected future in Ukrainian realities — in search of an epistemological foundation (part one)

Most works in the sociology of the future, represented mainly in Western sociology, rest on the epistemology of methodological individualism and rational choice theory. This means that the expected image of one's own future is only one's own project, whose realisation in the form of a life trajectory takes place thanks to one's expected own resources (human and educational capital) and to expected resources that may be designated as social capital. Possible deviations from the chosen life trajectory may be corrected through agency as traditionally defined — a conscious and rational choice of the optimal way out of a situation. But this epistemology does not work in a situation of large-scale macro-crisis, when systemic stability is no longer a resource for realising a life project. In that case an alternative epistemology may be provided by the methodological premises and integrative models of social change that arise from combining the main tenets of critical realism and the complexity paradigm.

Kateryna Bataieva

Higher education in a front-line city during the Russian-Ukrainian war: the cumulative effects of prolonged online learning

The article sets out the features of online learning at universities in a front-line city (using the example of Kharkiv) during the Russian-Ukrainian war and studies the effects of prolonged online learning on students. Its empirical part is based on the results of a study conducted in October–November 2024 by the method of in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve experts in higher education (heads of departments, deans and professors from six Kharkiv universities). The cumulative effects of prolonged online learning on students in the front-line city of Kharkiv showed themselves in a deterioration of the quality and results of students' learning and in difficulties with their academic socialisation and their involvement in research cooperation with teaching staff. Such a length of online learning also had a negative effect on teachers' satisfaction with their professional work in the absence of live communication with students in university lecture halls. Yet despite the negative effects of online learning in Kharkiv's universities, it is important to retain online learning in part (in the context of blended learning) after the war ends as well, which will help to develop and maintain professional contacts with Ukrainian teachers and researchers who have migrated and to enrich the social capital of the universities of Ukraine's front-line cities.

Nataliia Boiko

Trust in various sources of information under war conditions: a sociological analysis of the Ukrainian experience

The war has sharply increased Ukrainians' demand for news and up-to-date information. The situation of active information consumption under war conditions has brought to the fore the problem of the reliability of the information Ukrainians receive today and of their reaction to various sources of information in the contemporary information field. The article analyses the features of trust in various sources of information in contemporary Ukrainian society. The analysis is based on the results of a nationwide sociological survey of Ukraine's adult population conducted at the beginning of August 2024 within the international project “Media literacy and access to reliable information during the war in Ukraine”.

Serhii Yevdokymov

The phenomenon of virtual reality in the context of the transformations of contemporary sociocultural processes

The article offers a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of virtual reality as an innovative sociocultural formation that substantially changes the ways of human being, perception, communication and interaction in the digital age. Virtual reality is considered not only as a technological achievement but also as a space of new social practices in which alternative models of experience, thought and interaction take shape. Particular attention is given to how the virtual environment transforms the structure of culture, rethinks educational and artistic processes, transforms medical practice and opens new possibilities for psychological rehabilitation.

In the section “Academic life”:

Ukrainian society in conditions of polycrisis: the second sociological readings in memory of V. M. Vorona, Academician of the NAS of Ukraine (a brief report)

The second sociological readings in memory of Valerii Mykhailovych Vorona, Academician of the NAS of Ukraine, were held, as is now the tradition, on 5 March 2025 on the premises of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine. The mixed format of the conference is also becoming customary, with the number of online participants several times greater than the number taking part in traditional offline discussion. Digital technologies, however, help to widen the geography of the readings: this time the speakers and listeners included researchers from Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Dublin.